Hunter Kinemon was extended on the couch, his home-knitted socks
comfortably free of shoes, smoking a sandstone pipe with a reed stem.
Mrs. Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red
plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen
was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased
laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like
pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and
dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel.
It was May, school had stopped, and a door was open on a warm still
dusk. Allen's tale had come to an end; he was pinching the ear of a
diminutive dog--like a fat white sausage with wire-thin legs and a rat
tail--that never left him. The smoke from the elder Kinemon's pipe rose
in a tranquil cloud. Mrs. Kinemon rocked vigorously, with a prolonged
wail of the chair springs. "I got to put some tallow to that chair,"
Kinemon proclaimed.
"The house on Elbow Barren's took," Allen told him suddenly--"the one
just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening."
A revival of interest, a speculation, followed this announcement.
"Any women'll get to the church," Mr. Kinemon asserted. "I wonder? Did
a person say who were they?"
"I asked; but they're strange to Crabapple. I heard this though: there
weren't any women to them--just men--father and sons like. I drew up
right slow going by; but nobody passed out a word.
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